In a recent game my Investigator was lucky enough to find the remains of a Proto-Shoggoth at the Graveyard and then a two toughnes "taxidermist's trick" at the Historical Society. The third stop was the Woods, where Sadie Sheldon offered me membership.

My fellow players urged me to save the monster trophies, but it'd been a long time since anyone had even had a chance to join the Sheldon Gang, and I thought it could bring enough advantage to be worth it. So I seized my chance to join and during the game tried to steal three times. Once I got nothing and the other two times I got $2.00 each. In the end that extra $4.00 proved vital to getting a coulple of Investigators back to Arkham and restoring one's sanity .

So has anyone else been particularly helped by joining the Gang?

I haven't played many games so far, only about 10, and I've joined the Gang only once, with Wilson. He tried to steal maybe 3 or 4 times, and once he got a common item. If I recall correctly, it was a map of Arkham, so that gave him something like 7 movement points per turn. He could reach anywhere! That didn't prevent the GOO from waking up though, even if the investigators did beat him in FInal Combat.

Hey, I know this post is about 2 years old…but I have a question. Gang membership first appeared in Dunwich. But can you gain Sheldon Gang Membership any other way (i.e. without using any Encounter cards from the Dunwich set)?

Krysmopompas said:

The Miskatonic Horror expansion helps fixing this. There is a skill granting you a SGM from the beginning of the game, and some encounters should give you other opportunities to join the gang. Generally speaking, MH tries to solve many of these "hey this card never enters play unless I'm playing the XY expansion" problems. In case you don't have MH, no, there are no encounters (that I'm aware of) coming from other expansions offering you a SGM.

On that note, I was somewhat disappointed that the Miskatonic Horror expansion doesn't allow for Cult of the 1000 encounters on the extra boards (Dunwich, Kingsport, and Innsmouth). I would have thought that Devils Hopyard makes sense for Dunwich. Esoteric Order of Dagon in Innsmouth almost fits as long as they are open to inter-denominational services. Less sure about Kinsport (probably 7th House on the Left or 607 Water St).

END COMMUNICATION

On 1-11-2012 at 2:33 AM, Krysmopompas said:

Hey, I know this post is about 2 years old…but I have a question. Gang membership first appeared in Dunwich. But can you gain Sheldon Gang Membership any other way (i.e. without using any Encounter cards from the Dunwich set)?

On 1-11-2012 at 5:22 AM, Julia said:

The Miskatonic Horror expansion helps fixing this. There is a skill granting you a SGM from the beginning of the game, and some encounters should give you other opportunities to join the gang. Generally speaking, MH tries to solve many of these "hey this card never enters play unless I'm playing the XY expansion" problems. In case you don't have MH, no, there are no encounters (that I'm aware of) coming from other expansions offering you a SGM.

In DH there are only two encounter cards giving the posibility to join the Sheldon Gang. I played once with the Organized Crime Institution form MH that gives each player the choice to join or not. I consider it also nice to have the possibility to join SGM via the location encounters without having to play with the whole DH expansion or the Institution. I'm slowly expanding my knowledge of the game and adding small parts of other expansions to the base game. As much as possible parts actually, and SGM is surely part of that. So I took two encounter cards for that region (especially those where you have to sneak past SG) out of the deck and replaced them with the two DH location cards. This weekend I'll hope to have some feedback.

I hope some more Location Cards from MH have the possibility as Julia mentions (that skill might also be interesting), but since I am mostly playing base game with only one expansion those are not yet needed. Good to read about it, I didn't consider those multi-expansion location cards :-)

It is difficult with all those expansions to choose what to add to the base game or not, there's so much, and I have only two small box and two big box expansions (the third big one is for september).